


Love In An Asylum

by Not_You



Category: Watchmen (Comic), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M, False Identity, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions, Post-Canon, old fic, the squid is a hell of a drug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-01
Updated: 2017-05-01
Packaged: 2018-10-26 07:42:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10782492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: Written for this prompt:Remember how Rorschach's therapist was trying to see if he belonged in the prison or the asylum? Well, what if after Rorschach threw the oil on the one convict they decided he was too dangerous for the prison and sent him to the asylum Mothman was in?





	1. Chapter 1

Dr. Long's face is drawn, and his skin is the color of ash. He doesn't say "I told you so", at any point in the hearing, even though he wants to. Of course Rorsch-- Kovacs is insane. Of course he should be taken to a secure mental health facility. And shocked until his poor goddamned twisted brain fries out of his head. There is no fixing this man. Possibly, with heavy sedation and careful training, they can make him a little less dangerous. He isn't even really sure about that.

The new guy makes Byron think of fire, and he likes that. Moths like fire. He's so small. So real. When he comes in it's like whatever pitiful attempts at color there are in this place just fade away, and that's just enough like Bill that Byron floats along, unnoticed, all the way to the violent ward. Manages to look Rorschach right in those flat brown eyes, those eyes that he knows aren't real. He wasn't supposed to watch the news coverage, but he did, and looking at him now, he can see his real face, shifting slowly. He thinks at him loud and clear: _\--Stay down a while, champ. Get yourself out of the violent ward and I'll be waiting for you.--_

Rorschach is a model inmate, and gets to move back onto the right side of the floor within three weeks. He likes it better here than in prison. Lunatics at least can't help being what they are, and once he learns how to tuck his medication into his cheek while pretending to docilely swallow it, he's in business. And he has a friend, for the first time in years. Mothman may have been a liberal, a radical, and a commie-shielding possible homosexual, but he had not quit. He had stayed his course until his mind snapped under the strain, and Rorschach can respect that.

Names come and go. Mothman and Rorschach, Byron and Walter. It doesn't really matter, and all Rorschach's jagged, dark words about destiny and compulsion melt when Byron wraps his arms around him. It's strange to be the bigger party in an embrace. Strange to wrap around Rorschach and hug the tension out of his shoulders while he mutters about cameras in the ceiling, but good. He has never talked to these twisted, normal to the point of madness shrinks about being queer. It's got nothing to do with the way things change as he looks at them, and the way the shadows sometimes engulf him until he wakes up days later in a room full of other catatonics.

Rorschach knows Byron is a homosexual. But he doesn't try anything when they're curled up together in between bed-checks, and he's a good man driven mad by an evil world. And his arms are warm and if his soft humming makes Rorschach remember the few things from Walter's childhood that don't bite, he doesn't have to admit it.


	2. Chapter 2

Rorschach doesn't like the staff. The psychologists think that if they can crack his head open and run their sticky fingers through it like a child ruining a rack of dresses, they win a prize. The orderlies are either terrified that he'll attack them or spoiling for a fight. The only person on the whole floor that he can stand beside Byron and the full-time catatonics (he doesn't understand why they disturb everyone so much. What they're doing is an artform. Living sculpture instead of flawed humanity. He wishes he could do it too) is Nurse Williams. 

Byron doesn't like the staff, either. He has some kind of complicated relationship with Dr. Osborn where he's pretty sure he'd cry if the guy died if he wasn't responsible for it himself, and he likes Clarice, and that's it. Even if his mind is like an overtuned engine rusting away in a junkyard, he's still amused when Rorschach calls her 'Nurse Williams', like a little kid. Looking at the two of them as she performs the impossible and coaxes Rorschach to take a pill, he can see that she feels it to. She looks like the mother he should have had as she sits there and gently reasons with him instead of calling for some fucking brownshirt moose to sit on him while she crams it down his throat. He doesn't even know where they find these guys.

It's been a long time since Rorschach has trusted anyone who isn't Daniel, but he trusts Nurse Williams when she says the pill is for his blood pressure. It helps that he's been through a physical here and seen for himself that it's high. Doesn't surprise him. Stress, aging, poor diet. Walter's frailties are always in his way. So Rorschach swallows, and Nurse Williams smiles, and thanks him. They would have given her trouble if he hadn't taken it, and since she actually agrees that he needs this, she hadn't felt like dealing with it.

Byron has adored this woman since she agreed that his flat refusal to take Thorazine could be their little secret. That had been way back when he first came, when he wasn't so much really psychotic as furious and grief-stricken for damned good reasons. Not that he's not crazy, he's just not biting crazy. It had been going on for years. The DT's got worse and took longer to go away every damn time he tried to dry out, and pretty soon he was seeing spiders on the walls no matter how drunk he got. He's pretty sure he felt his mind snap, at some point during that last long strange detox. Ever since his senses have been... not so much unreliable as embellished. There are days he feels like can see around corners, and he knows that people ask him questions and he gives the wrong answers.

Rorschach doesn't seem to mind. When Clarice clicks away on her white pumps to do the rest of her round, he gets up and takes Byron's arm. It's reached the point where he can tell when the walls kind of grab Byron, when he feels glued there and like stepping away is as impossible as walking to the moon. He clings to him for a moment and then lets go so some damned orderly won't see and tell some damned shrink that they're a pair of queers. Sure, he is, but Rorschach isn't. At least, he's pretty sure he isn't, but there's something that flickers in his eyes sometimes that makes Byron wonder if he isn't wrong again.


	3. Chapter 3

the force of four hundred inmates sent into a tailspin by the seductive thoughtwaves of the dying creature in New York. He and Rorschach are the only ones to keep their heads and try to get out instead of trying to eat the orderlies. Not that the idea doesn't have its charm, but it's so much better to devour Rorschach's mouth, to whimper as those desperate hands clutch at his clothes and his skin hard enough to bruise. He knows something broke tonight in Rorschach’s head, and he’s hoping it doesn’t hurt.

For some reason it’s not wrong anymore. Maybe it has something to do with his father after all, but no matter what that sly-eyed shrink said, he has never and will never imagine Charlie to be anything like Byron. But there is a kind of safety in these frail arms that he has wanted all his life, and now nothing seems obscene. He has been touched by a titanic and alien force, and even the feel of another man pressed tight against him and the disgusting little sounds of their mouths working together seems clean and right after that. He doesn’t know much about kissing, but Byron seems to. No touch has ever affected him like the anticipation of contact until now. Anything that actually happened was grimy and transitory, but Byron is kissing him here and now, and holding him like he will never let go, and he can only hang on and hope that his knees don’t give out completely.

They’re gone by dawn, with a pillowcase of canned goods, real clothes stolen from the staff lockers, and the Superintendent’s revolver, previously thought to be mythological. Byron loves it already. The grip is perfect, and the gun is everything she should be: heavy and lethal and beautiful. It’s a lovely morning for an escape, and Byron can’t feel anything but ecstatic to be walking in the woods again. Rorschach looks as if he has just been baptized, shocked and washed clean. They’re both so goddamn old, but Rorschach looks about ten in the new light, and Byron feels the same. Reaching over and taking his hand is the most natural thing in the world, and he starts talking about things he hasn’t talked about in decades. Old, old stories from when he was still new and things hadn’t gotten so bad.

Byron’s histories and tantalizing half-memories are so fascinating, that Rorschach is almost annoyed to be interrupted by Archie. Almost. He dumps out the cans and waves the pillowcase frantically, and Archie dips as low as he can, treetops scratching his belly. Daniel throws a ladder down, and Rorschach hefts a confused but docile Byron up ahead of him. He climbs well for a man his age and offers Rorschach a hand up. As soon as the hatch is shut, he’s examining his surroundings with bright, birdlike eyes. 

“Oh my god, I thought I’d never find you.” He clasps Rorschach’s hand, worn and ragged and profoundly relieved. He’s been aiding rescue efforts in the city, and Rorschach can forgive him everything because he looks a hero again. He asks after Byron, who has found his snowsuit and is rubbing his face lightly across it, and Rorschach explains. Dan puts on the autopilot and tells him that Hollis is dead, and can Byron take the news? 

“Tougher than he looks.” 

Dan has to tweak his cache of spare identities a little, but Stephen Hollis and his sons settle comfortably enough in Mexico. Sam doesn’t even try to understand just what the hell is going on with Stephen (who forgets his alias but is crazy enough that people think that he thinks that he’s Lord Byron, so it all works out) and Seth (who insists his real name is Rorschach anyway, so it doesn't matter). He knows they share a bed, and he doesn’t want to know any more. Besides, there are owl boxes to attend to and things to invent. He’s even got a garden started out back, just to have something else to tinker with, and if the small sounds he can only occasionally hear from the other bedroom make him remember that he’s so fucking lonely he could die, he doesn’t say anything about it even to his massive sunflowers with their empty, sympathetic faces.

After a month of this, Laurie comes back from Mars and steps into his arms like she never left. Byron thinks she’s an absolute doll, and she’s somehow utterly unsurprised to find this family less dysfunctional than her original one.


End file.
